Why the anniversary of Nick Mollberg’s testimony should shake every quiet ally awake
One Year After That Texan Went Viral, Your Silence Is the Permission Slip
One year ago today, a guy from Austin walked into a Texas Senate committee room and did the thing almost nobody wants to do. He looked bigots in the eye and named them.
His name is Nick Mollberg. He is not trans. He had never testified before a legislative body before that May afternoon (The Pink News, 2025b). And he said the thing out loud that women like me have been saying for years into microphones that felt broken:
“Do y’all ever get tired of being on the wrong side of history?” (Mollberg, 2025).
The video went viral. Pedro Pascal shared it. George Takei shared it. The Instagram reel crossed two million views, and the TikTok crossed one million (Skinner, 2025). For a week, Mollberg was the internet’s favorite Texan. A lot of trans people, me included, cried on our phones.
Then the bill passed anyway.
On June 20, 2025, Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 229 into law. The statute took effect September 1, 2025 (Klibanoff, 2025). It defines sex in the Texas state code by biology at birth. It tells intersex Texans they do not exist. It tells trans Texans that Texas will refuse to acknowledge who we are on our driver’s licenses, our birth certificates, and our death certificates (Klibanoff, 2025).
That last one is the part that gets me. Our death certificates.
Sit with that for a second. Texas passed a law making sure that when trans Texans die, the state will misgender us one last time, on the page that gets filed in a courthouse forever.
I live in South Dakota. I am not Texan. Still, HB 229 is a template. Texas Republicans filed more than 120 anti-trans bills in the 2025 session, the most of any state in the country (Axios Houston, 2025). By the time Abbott held his signing ceremony, Texas had become the fourteenth state to enact one of these sex-definition laws (Klibanoff, 2025). The Texas playbook is now the national playbook.
What Mollberg Actually Said
Let me sit with the substance for a minute, for the people who saw only the six-second cut.
Mollberg told the committee that the legislature was not protecting anyone. He said they had chosen to bully one percent of the population and to hurt that one percent as badly as they could. He said lawmakers were not interested in helping or protecting women, that the women ‘s-rights framing was a Trojan horse, and that the real purpose of HB 229 was to hurt trans people (Skinner, 2025). He told the senators that if they wanted him to look them in the eye as he named them bigots and cowards, he would gladly do so (The Pink News, 2025a).
Then he asked what their grandkids would say to them in the future.
The answer Mollberg gave on behalf of those future grandkids was simple. What these senators were doing was bigotry, the same flavor as every past generation’s bigotry, just pointed at a new target (The Pink News, 2025a). That sentence is the one quiet allies keep trying not to say. It is the sentence that has to come out of your mouth, in your language, in your own tone, directed at your own representative. Soon.
What the Year Has Looked Like for Us
Here is what happened in the twelve months after Mollberg said what he said.
On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14168, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” (Williams Institute, 2025). The order redefines sex for federal purposes to mean biological characteristics at conception. Passports. Prison placements. Federal employment. Homeless shelters. Refugee status. All of it now routes through a definition that pretends I do not exist (Williams Institute, 2025).
In July 2025, the federal government shut down the specialized service for LGBTQ+ youth at the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said it would no longer “silo” services for that group (The Trevor Project, 2025).
A suicide line. For queer kids. The federal government turned it off.
In December 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed rules blocking Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care for patients under eighteen, and cutting Medicaid and Medicare funding from any hospital that provides that care to children (KFF, 2026). Twenty-seven states had already banned gender-affirming care for minors by then (KFF, 2025).
In November 2025, the Human Rights Campaign released its annual murder count. Twenty-seven trans and gender-nonconforming people were killed between Transgender Day of Remembrance 2024 and November 20, 2025. Since 2013, the organization has documented at least 399 of us dead, disproportionately Black trans women, disproportionately young, usually shot (Human Rights Campaign, 2025).
